Girl Scout cookies for breakfast

Halloween is all about candy and Thanksgiving is all about pie, but Christmas is all about cookies. By the time January comes around, most people are all cookied out. On top of that, the New Year is when resolutions of healthier lifestyles are most common. January is probably the least cookie-friendly time of the year.

So it’s always particularly impressed me that the Girl Scouts choose January as their cookie season. It’s like they want to give themselves the biggest challenge possible. “Sure, ladies, we can sell a million boxes of these cookies. But can we do it right after Christmas? Can we sell them outside of Wal-Mart to folks going inside to buy new workout clothes?” They can, and they do!

And now Girl Scout cookie cereal is a thing!

Thin Mints
The moment I opened my box of Thin Mints cereal I noticed it smelled exactly like Thin Mint cookies. Blindfolded, I wouldn’t have been able to differentiate the cookies from the cereal.

Regarding taste, the cereal tastes basically the same as the cookies. The only difference is in texture. The cereal is a bit drier than the cookies, probably because of the lack of frosting. Eating it with milk helps with this. And the cereal has a puffier, more airy texture than the cookies. In other words: just as minty, but not as thin. And I am quite OK with this.

It’s a good thing the taste is so similar to the classic cookies because as a cereal, there isn’t much variety in your bowl. There’s no mix of cookie pieces and marshmallows, for example. It’s just Thin Mints, for better or for worse. I’m not sure what you could add to this to provide additional variety. I can’t imagine the mintiness of the cereal would make it work well with berries or bananas. But this cereal is good enough that I’m willing to have more to try out a few possibilities.

Caramel Crunch
I can’t give the same praise to Caramel Crunch. This cereal is supposedly inspired by Samoas cookies, at least based on the fact that a Samoa is right there on the box. But if it came in a generic yellow box with nothing but the word “CEREAL” pasted across the front of it, darned if I’d be able to link it to Girl Scout cookies in any way.

Caramel Crunch doesn’t look or smell like Samoas. It’s all caramel, with just a tiny hint of chocolate. Is caramel or chocolate the first thing you think of when you think Samoas? I wager you first think, “Coconut!” But there’s no coconut to be found here.

This was just bland. I found myself wishing I had some Cocoa Puffs to mix together with it. I ended up just adding some Thin Mints to my bowl, which made it better, but only because now it tasted like Thin Mints. The caramel flavor disappeared.

So General Mills is .500 on Girl Scout cookies cereals, which is still well above the Mendoza line. Don’t miss Thin Mints, but take the money you’d spend on Caramel Crunch and give it to the girl on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store for a box of Samoas.